ISPs that block access to sites hosting the Christchurch shooting video set a worrisome precedent that ISPs may put up barriers between customers and content
Context & Ripple Effects
The Slate piece lands ten days after Australian telcos took the first step, blocking 4chan, 8chan, Voat, Zerohedge, and Liveleak for continuing to host the Christchurch footage — moving censorship from the platform layer down to the network layer for the first time in this episode. What came before was a platform failure: Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter struggled for days to halt the spread of a video one shooter livestreamed on Facebook, and Facebook later counted 800+ distinct variants it had to block.
Why it matters: when platforms fail, the fallback is carriers deciding what their customers can reach — and Zerohedge's presence on the Australian block list shows the net already widening past sites whose only sin was hosting the video.
First-order effects
- Customers of participating ISPs immediately lose direct access to the blocked sites, with no due-process step between the carrier's decision and the customer's connection.
- Sites like Liveleak that host user video now face removal from entire national networks as a penalty for hosting decisions, not just individual takedown requests.
Second-order effects
- Other carriers face pressure to match the Australian telco block list or be cast as the permissive path for the same footage, making blocking the default competitive posture during a crisis.
- Hosting platforms and forums respond by pre-emptively scrubbing or refusing violent content faster than their own policies require, because the alternative punishment is network-level exclusion rather than a takedown notice.
Third-order effects
- If crisis-driven blocks become routine, ISPs harden into content gatekeepers — a role shift that eventually invites formal regulation defining when carriers must filter, as later coverage of mass-shooting broadcasts in 2022 shows the underlying question still unresolved years on.
- The distinction between moderating content you host and controlling content your customers can reach erodes, collapsing the legal and market separation between conduits and publishers.
The trend: Content moderation is migrating up the stack from platforms to network operators, with each crisis expanding which intermediaries are expected to restrict access.